As it celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, James Balmont considers the film’s subversive legacy and why – amid fresh disruption in Hong Kong – it “has never felt more relevant”
Shadows, fire, and great stone statues dominate the opening of Infernal Affairs like some hellish James Bond title sequence. But despite the bombastic insinuations, the film that follows is neither hokey fantasy nor an adrenalised bullet ballet like the ones Hong Kong was once known for. A complex metropolitan crime thriller of the sharpest order, Infernal Affairs would defy expectations in many ways upon its release in 2002 – and at the height of one of the industry’s darkest eras, this was the film that briefly put Hong Kong cinema back on the world map.
Lau (Andy Lau) is an ambitious and high-ranking police inspector secretly planted in the bureau by a powerful crime lord, Sam (Eric Tsang). One of the gangster’s top henchmen, meanwhile, is Chan (Tony Leung) – an undercover policeman whose true identity is unknown to all except police Superintendent Wong (Anthony Wong). As both sides of the law prepare to strike in the midst of a major criminal investigation, the two moles become aware of one another’s existence. They only have so much time to identify each other before they are exposed themselves.
With duplicitous themes and mirror visuals aptly reflecting Hong Kong’s identity crisis at the turn of the century, the film would be a huge hit at the box office and at awards ceremonies both at home and overseas, spawning two sequels, an Oscar-winning Hollywood remake, and scores of filmic doppelgangers. And as it marks its 20th anniversary this year, entering the Criterion collection for a UK re-release on November 28, Infernal Affairs still endures as one of Hong Kong’s greatest crime sagas. But why?
From the late 80s to the early 90s, Hong Kong enjoyed a cinematic golden age. Auteurs like Wong Kar-wai (In The Mood For Love) and Stanley Kwan (Rouge) were beginning their ascents in the arthouse world, while mainstream filmmakers like John Woo (A Better Tomorrow), Ringo Lam (City On Fire) and Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China) were releasing action-packed blockbusters that made superstars of Chow Yun-fat and Jet Li. An explosion of pornographic and gruesomely violent exploitation films occurred with the introduction of Hong Kong’s notorious ‘Category III’ film classification system. And with around 300 full features completed in 1993, the ‘Hollywood of the East’ was exporting works all over the continent to major box office returns.
It wasn’t to last. Criminal disruption had already led to Jet Li’s manager’s murder in 1992, after he refused to loan out his star to a Triad-produced movie, while Carina Lau (Flowers of Shanghai) was kidnapped from the set of Days of Being Wild. The looming Hong Kong Handover of 1997, in which autonomy would be transferred from Britain to Mainland China, only made things worse – with Hong Kong filmmaking figureheads like Woo, Lam and Hark departing for Hollywood, fearing stifled creative liberties and diminished work opportunities at home. Rampant piracy and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis fuelled cinema closures and reduced budgets. And by 1998, only 85 features were completed as the industry nose-dived into recession.
But in 2002, two experienced filmmakers Andrew Lau (a cinematographer on City on Fire and Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express) and Alan Mak completed a different kind of Hong Kong crime thriller – resisting pressure from production house Media Asia to “add more action scenes” and instead addressing the country’s identity crisis with nuance. Instead of literally swapping faces, as the absent Woo had done with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in his 1997 Hollywood sensation Face/Off, Mak wanted his characters to “swap destinies”. The result was…
Read More: Why Infernal Affairs Is Still Hong Kong’s Greatest Crime Saga